Synonyms

Introduction

In its early years as an academic field, philosophy of education distinguished “childraising” from “education,” and little was said about mothers, fathers, and the part they play in education. In the 1970s and 1980s, mothers and motherhood were important topics in a flourishing feminist conversation about aspects of children’s education that had previously been treated by philosophers of education as unworthy of the field’s attention. By the late 1980s, this conversation was being subjected to criticisms that it essentialized and romanticized women, reiterated problematic gender binaries, and ignored relevant differences among women. Mothers and motherhood remained a live topic for some, but a scan of journals that publish philosophical work on education shows relatively few articles directly concerned with motherhood/mothers in the past decade. Yet questions about mothers and mothering are alive...